Party spin steps on policy toes in election dance

Both major parties see their opponent's leader as susceptible to character attack.

AAP: Lukas Coch

Labor and the Coalition are going to increasingly step on each other's toes in the policy debates leading up to the federal election. They will attempt to highlight their differences, but will they be able to, asks Peter Chen.

Since the return to the ALP leadership of Kevin Rudd on June 27, the two major parties have accelerated their strange convergence dance.

During the past two terms weird things have been coming out of the Canberra policy skunkworks: Labor embraced a marketplace solution for carbon pricing, while the Coalition announced a state-led plan to "pick winners" in the emerging abatement industry sector. Labor's taken up a service voucher model for disability services, while the Liberals have become positively Scandinavian in their tax-the-rich response to provide a generous maternity leave scheme.

Rather than the swing back "to the left" he signalled three years ago would be the result of a restoration of his leadership, Rudd embraced the Clinton-esque strategy of "policy triangulation" on his return to office: Wrong footing years of brand-building through co-opting his opponents policies in areas seen as popular with the community. In neutralising these "negatives" Rudd abandoned the fixed carbon price and more dramatically stitched up a last-minute pair of pacific deals to outsource Australia's humanitarian obligations.

While these quick decisions demonstrate the policy juggernaut of the Rudd of old, they're not high watermarks of good governance. Both of these decisions represent the type of political expediency that Rudd, an advocate of "evidence-based policymaking" once claimed to abhor. In addition, the subsequent blitz of highly partisan government advertising to sell the PNG deal demonstrates Rudd's willingness to engage in the whatever-it-takes politics necessary to employ publicly-funded propaganda he once described as a "cancer on democracy". Clearly, however, it's not the bad type of cancer you may have heard of.

If these policy backflips and moral climb-downs were in different areas of policy, this set of decisions would have been a huge boon for Tony Abbott to attack Rudd in his perceived area of strength: as a policy wonk. While Abbott could draw upon a range of examples from the first term of government to show that Rudd's frenetic approach to policy making demonstrates a serious weakness in implementation (pink batts, laptops in schools, aspects of the school building and renewal scheme), the three-year separation of the Gillard government largely neutralises the punch of these criticisms.

Neither of the recent announcements is easily defended as examples of good policy making. The decision to adopt the European floating price for carbon without changing the compensation package converts a complex economic rebalancing with questionable carbon reduction potential into little more than a stimulus package with no economic benefits (indeed, it should increase consumption and its corresponding environmental implications). The new pacific solution is likely to face considerable legal challenge, high per-person costs, and is aimed more at domestic consumption than at those source countries that are producing the displaced people.

These policy areas sit in domains that Abbott doesn't want to spend time unpacking before the public, largely because his policy responses are similarly ill-formed and likely to face considerable cost-overruns and under-performance. Thus, Rudd's loss of policy face won't be highlighted by the Opposition. In addition, by back-flipping on the carbon price, Rudd can be accused of showing disdain for Julia Gillard's careful negotiation with the Greens to ensure a minority government could govern effectively. But this won't be an issue either: both the major parties are agreed in their public disdain for these new upstarts impinging on their natural terrain. With this, non-atmospheric environmental issues have almost completely disappeared from Australian politics.

Triangulation is not only a strategy of the ALP. The most recent announcement by the Opposition to adopt the Gonski school funding model (at least for a minimum period), demonstrates their desire to neutralise the perception that they might be likely to introduce European-style austerity budgets in areas where the public have always been suspicious of the Coalition: education and health (previous elections have been notable in the high profile endorsement that Liberal leaders have given to Medicare).

All of this convergence will have implications for the election. Now that the mutual business of negative neutralisation has occurred, the convergent parties will now attempt to highlight their differences. But will they be able to? Unlike previous elections, we're likely to see the strange situation where both effectively run as oppositions: One real opposition and an ALP coming into an election with such a different leadership team and selective memory of the achievements of the last three years that the Prime Minister is likely to attempt to campaign more on new policies than any record of performance.

Convergence, therefore, will be unavoidable. Both major parties see their opponent's leader as susceptible to character attack. The ALP have recently imported negative messaging experts from overseas to sharpen their attack advertising, and the Liberal party have new versions of the "Lemon 07" campaign ready to go. Having narrowed the policy terrain down considerably, the two parties are going to increasingly bump into each other in the policy debate they do have, and are going to look to a smaller number of headline policy issues to define their campaigns.

The emerging theme for the campaign will be the economy, and possibly health. Rudd and Abbott are likely to highlight their experience in effectively managing the economy. Both will be framing their pitch from history: Abbott harking back to the golden age of Howard's government, and Rudd his first-term handling of the global financial crisis.

Responsibility for the last three years won't get much of a look-in. If health gets onto the agenda in a serious way, Rudd will be talking up his "massive" plans for a Commonwealth-led plan for state hospital services, possibly giving the Opposition a wind to question his tendency to over-promise and under-deliver.

Peter John Chen will be writing weekly for The Drum throughout the 2013 federal election campaign. He is a politics lecturer at the Department of Government at the University of Sydney. View his full profile here.

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